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Petroglyphs
About 25 min from Hindrum by car
Five thousand years ago, a man stands by the rock, a pointed stone in his hand that is firmly in his grasp. On the rock, he has drawn the silhouette of a moose calf, which turns its head towards a larger moose. He then begins the painstaking work of digging the lines deeper into the rock.
The man who drew the figure lives, together with his people, from hunting and fishing in the Stone Age. All over the world at this time, figures are drawn and painted in mountains and rocks. For thousands of years, the rock art remains there, tangible traces of Stone Age people, our ancestors.
It is possible that they shook these moose figurines to gain power over the animals and ensure good hunting luck. It is also possible that the figurines were made by shamans who could dress up as animals and carry out ritual journeys to the spirit world. Another theory is that the rock carvings served as a backdrop for the theater of the time, where stories were told from old to young around the campfire.
The rock carvings here were discovered in 1977 by Trond Strømgren, a secondary school student from Trondheim. They are located where there is the shortest route across the Trondheimsfjord from the Fosenhalvøya to Byneset. This place may have been a meeting place for trappers from both sides of the fjord.
Little is known about why they drew these figures and what they meant. The written language did not exist, and therefore we have no written evidence of their social life and world of thought. The few clues we have are the tools archaeologists uncover and the enigmatic petroglyphs.
The rock carvings probably played an important role in the social life of the trappers. They may be records of myths about the first people who settled there, or they may mark sacred places where special rituals took place, for example at the transition from child to adult. In the past it was believed that they had a hunting magic function.
The figure composition consists of five figures, four of which represent moose. The fifth figure cannot be determined by species. The largest figure consists only of a head and two legs and is unlikely to have ever been completed. One of the animals has a bent back head, which is very rare. These figures were chiseled into the rock using simple stone tools early in the Neolithic, probably 5,000–6,000 years ago. They were made at a time when the people in Trøndelag still lived by fishing and hunting, in addition to gathering shells, plants and roots.
Moose and other deer are the most common motif in all rock carvings from the Stone Age in Central Norway. They are found on rock surfaces from Norway in the west to the far east of Siberia. The fact that they shared similar motifs and forms of expression indicates that the people across this vast area were in contact with each other during the Stone Age.
